For businesses that operate in the cloud, rising costs can quickly become a significant challenge. As cloud operations expand, managing expenses while maintaining efficiency becomes increasingly complex. Addressing these issues without sacrificing performance or scalability requires a thoughtful approach and a clear understanding of your options.
The members of Forbes Technology Council are no strangers to managing tech costs, especially when it comes to the cloud. Below, they share insights for optimizing cloud efficiency and controlling costs so you can balance innovation and high performance with financial sustainability.
1. Find Flexible Options
A new, smarter way to manage rising cloud expenses is to move to a composable and flexible model or a microservice. This approach lets you activate only what you need, avoiding unnecessary expenses on unused resources. Pay-as-you-grow flexibility is key. – HK Bain, Digitech Systems, LLC
2. Right-Size Your Resources
Cost optimization in the cloud is about spending smarter, not merely cutting costs. To address escalating expenses, organizations should right-size their resources to match precise workload demands, proactively monitor deployments for inefficiencies, and implement strict budget governance with automated alerts. This strategic approach maximizes operational efficiency and drives cost savings. – Anand Santhanam, Amazon Web Services
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3. Optimize Monitoring With Converged Solutions
Securing cloud-based applications and services is not an area to cut corners amid today’s threat landscape, but there are ways to make this component less costly. To protect data and mitigate risk for less, businesses should seek converged solutions that monitor more vectors at once, combine more innovative technologies, and incorporate automation for simplified management. – Thyaga Vasudevan, Skyhigh Security
4. Cut Nonproduction Costs
Most companies pay more for their nonproduction cloud resources than their production resources. Orphaned resources and wrong-sized resources can be a huge money pit. The remedy is to rethink strategies for nonproduction instances and use spot instances where possible. Automatically turn resources on or off where possible. Actively retire unused instances or resources. – Gautam Velpula, GoTo Foods LLC
5. Drive Systems Orchestration And Collaboration With AI
While the move to cloud technology has had incredible advantages, we have also overwhelmed our employees with the tech stack we put in front of them. As a result, we are getting less and less out of our cloud investments. Leveraging an AI strategy that sits on top of your current tech stack to drive the orchestration of systems and collaboration of people can unlock those investments and ROI. – Michael Haske, Krista.ai
6. Evaluate Your Resource Performance
Assess the performance of your resources. If the average CPU or memory usage is below 50%, consider switching to smaller instances. Analyze your compute usage and explore purchasing savings packages to reduce costs. Lastly, for services that don’t need to run 24/7, switch to serverless implementations to pay only for the compute time you use. – Uzair Ahmed, Right-Hand Cybersecurity
7. Minimize Cloud Service Usage Where Possible, And Turn To Open-Source Solutions
The more cloud services you use, the less negotiation leverage you have. Stick to virtual machines or bare metal instances, avoiding Lambda and virtualized storage. If higher-level services are necessary, choose open-source vendors. This reduces financial risk and supports the software ecosystem instead of handing all profits to the cloud provider. – Ash Vardanian, Unum
8. Consider SaaS Solutions
Evaluate the cost; if it makes sense, move to software as a service solutions. Other options include automating everything possible to save on staff hours for upgrades and fixes, building a self-sufficient cloud onboarding portal to onboard customers without manual intervention, and using AI technology to automate mundane and repetitive operations tasks. – Deepa Bastante, MassMutual
9. Integrate FinOps
Leverage cloud FinOps to enhance visibility and foster accountability by incorporating financial outcomes into design and architecture processes. This approach drives cost-effective innovation and ensures cloud spending aligns with business objectives. – Kim Bozzella, Protiviti
10. Dig Into Compute Costs
Data storage is cheap—compute is where costs can get out of control if data ingestion and transformation pipelines aren’t optimized. Manual coding often results in human errors and inconsistencies that burn compute. Another common practice, last-mile data transformations coded in the business intelligence layer, can also multiply costs. – Armon Petrossian, Coalesce
11. Avoid Proprietary Interfaces
Prioritize avoiding proprietary interfaces between cloud infrastructure elements, such as virtual machines or containers. This approach enables the easy replacement of inefficient solutions. With the right interfaces, companies can swap out ineffective components, such as firewalls, where the hardware footprints may vary—for example, some 10Gbps cloud firewalls require two CPU cores, while others may need 20, impacting costs. – Alexander Britkin, NFWare
12. Conduct Regular Audits
From what I’ve seen, regular audits are essential. Our company regularly reviews our cloud spending each quarter, identifying and optimizing unused resources and workloads. In this manner, we ensure a balance between performance and expenses while remaining mindful of the value our investments provide. – Asad Khan, LambdaTest Inc.
13. Stay On Top Of Updates And/Or New Products
To manage rising cloud costs, the starting point must be monitoring and optimization. For businesses that already do this well, another way to manage costs is to stay on top of updates and/or new products; many software vendors’ new releases offer a variety of solutions specifically focused on cloud usage cost optimization. – Henry Patishman, Regula
14. Invest In Proactive Engineering
Don’t be reactive—be proactive. Being reactive means using tooling to help understand your deployments, avoid cloud sprawl and manage costs. While worthwhile, these are all after-the-fact strategies, and if you find yourself considering them, take a moment to pause. Investing in proactive engineering, DevOps and product best practices for portability and orchestration will pay dividends. – Mark Mahle, NetActuate, Inc.
15. Focus On Data Management
Consider data management strategies that focus on three key areas: tiering—storing frequently accessed data on faster, more reliable solutions; summarizing—aggregating data to reduce storage needs; and cleansing—removing unused or redundant data to improve efficiency and quality. – Ashraf Karim, Cisco
16. Start Small
One effective strategy I’ve used is to start with only the smallest ephemeral cloud services needed and architect systems to grow and scale alongside the business. This approach allows costs to be directly tied to revenue. By starting lean and expanding resources as demand increases, companies can optimize their cloud spend and maintain better cost control as they grow. – Gabriel Gonzalez, Edenred
17. Reevaluate Your Processes
One effective strategy is to implement cost optimization measures. This includes measuring and evaluating what processes cost the most and assessing if these costs are necessary. Transitioning to more serverless or container-based services may also help decrease costs. – Robert Mao, ArcBlock Inc.
18. Focus On Efficiency
Managing rising cloud costs is not easy, but it starts with optimizing your resources, monitoring costs and being able to auto-scale. Focus on efficiency by creating right-size instances and eliminating unnecessary resources. This will help you control expenses while ensuring cloud operations remain agile and cost-effective. – Daniel Keller, InFlux Technologies Limited (FLUX)
19. Embrace A Multicloud Strategy
Rather than relying solely on a single cloud vendor, establish a comprehensive multicloud strategy. By diversifying your cloud services across several providers, you can leverage competitive pricing, access a broader range of services and mitigate risks associated with vendor lock-in. – Anoop Gupta, Capital One
20. Prioritize Apps And Optimize Resources
Most enterprises are facing rising cloud costs these days. To reduce major incremental costs, adopt automated optimization solutions. Determine the most productive or customer-dependent apps to prioritize, then create a cost-per-app model to finalize your reduction plan and strategy. Optimizing data storage and resources is key. – Erum Manzoor, Citigroup